The Postcolonial literature

  

           Assignment

Name: Rupa Bambhaniya

Paper No: 11 The Postcolonial literature

Enrollment no: 2069108420200002

Class: M.A sem 3

Submitted by: Smt.S.B.Gardhi, Department of English

Email I'd: rupabambhniya166@gmail.com

      

 Introduction : 

       

Fanon reflects on why he chose to write Black Skin, White Masks. He argues that in order to understand racism, we must ask what “man” wants and what “the black man” wants. Fanon seeks to understand the relationship between white and black people, and argues that both groups are trapped within their own racial identities. He argues that psychoanalysis is a useful tool for understanding the black experience, and that, through analysis, it is possible to “destroy” the enormous psychological complex that has developed as a result of colonialism. He gives an overview of each chapter and ends by emphasizing that it is difficult to understand the true nature of black experience because white society has created so many harmful myths about black people.

 Theme of the Black skin White masks …….

Desire to the White :

This theme is very important in the Black skin White masks because so many peoples desire to the white skin . How many people believe that white skin gives self-respect, power.

You see, many people hate and love their color.A major theme through Black Skin, White Masks is a desire on the part of Black people to be white. Fanon discusses this in relation to interracial relationships, where having a white lover seems to provide access to a formerly prohibited white world. For Fanon, the desire to be white derives from the power differential within a society. In other words, people see that white people have more opportunities and economic advantage, and they desire to become white in order to join that sphere of opportunity. However, Black people can’t actually become white. They will always be Black, according to Fanon, and so the desire to be white causes a psychological problem of losing a sense of one’s self.

Knowledge vs. Ignorance :

 Most of the time people understand white skin people with j knowledge. Other black skin people do not understand man. Fanon is forthcoming about his own status as a highly-educated intellectual, but remains critical of the ways in which academic knowledge is entangled with the history of colonialism, not just because the academic worldview tended to be white- and Euro-centric, but because the work of academics has historically been used as justification for racism. On the other hand, Fanon argues that ignorance and misinformation are to blame for many of the problems that exist within the colonial (and postcolonial) world. He criticizes the tendency to too easily accept simplistic or conventional understandings of the world and concludes the book with a “final prayer” against such intellectual complacency: “Always make me a man who questions!”

  He argues: “Intellectual alienation is a creation of bourgeois society. And for me bourgeois society is any society that becomes ossified in a predetermined mold, stifling any development, progress, or discovery.” Although ignorance is dangerous, Fanon shows that certain forms of knowledge can be dangerous, too.

Racists Create Inferiority :

An important argument to which Fanon returns more than once is that Black people don’t naturally feel inferior. Instead, their sense of inferiority is produced by racist societies. Because of the recognition involved in identity, white people create their own sense of superiority by saying Blacks are inferior. You can’t have superiority without inferiority, and Black people come to have this position. As a result, getting rid of an inferiority complex in Black people isn’t just a matter of correcting a neurosis in an individual. It requires the transformation of an entire society in which this hierarchy of inferiority and superiority is perpetuated.

      

Self-Image and Self-Hatred :

A man with white skin has made the mistake of thinking of himself as the best of all, by making his image such that black men consider themselves inferior.Such identities show everywhere and white-skinned men love themselves, and black-skinned men hate themselves. As noted in other themes, Fanon argues that colonialism has corrupted people’s understanding of themselves. Black people have an image of themselves that is distorted a negative image constructed by white colonizers. Black people experience the weight of being “hated, detested, and despised” by white society. This leads to feelings of shame and self-hatred. Many black people try to become “more white” as a result, which only induces further shame due to the hopelessness of that task. Fanon describes this experience in visceral terms: “Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea.”

Approaching one’s understanding of oneself from a place of nothingness provides no tools for forming a sense of self-worth or a positive self-image.

Fanon argues that black people’s feelings of self-hatred are not only rooted in the internalization of negative stereotypes about their race but that these feelings also stem from a general lack of recognition of black people as human. 

 

    Recognition by the Other :

Fanon draws upon the philosophical work of Hegel and others in order to argue for the ways in which a sense of one’s self is produced by how one is seen by others. Black people, for instance, do not think of themselves as Black until someone who is white “a white Other” recognizes them as such and imposes a sense of inferiority upon them. This means identity categories are always produced through interaction and relationships that involved people with different social positions.

Individual vs. Social Problem:

Related to the previous theme, Fanon consistently critiques other philosophers and psychologists for casting a social problem as an individual problem. It is racist societies that produce neuroses in Black people, for instance, rather than these problems being “private” problems of one person or another. Psychologists who treat Black people in isolation from social context will provide bad advice; they can’t see that it is necessary to transform the entire social system in order for Black people to be able to flourish.

Knowing vs. Acting :

Because Fanon’s ultimate goal is freedom, he values action more than knowledge. That means it is more important that people have the agency than it is that people know everything there is to know about racism and racist history. In other words, he doesn’t actually think everyone needs to read his book in order to be free. Knowledge isn’t a prerequisite for action. The important thing is enhancing people’s agency.

Colonialism, Diaspora, and Alienation :

   In the broadest sense, Black Skin, White Masks is a book about the powerful effects of colonialism on life in the 20th century. Fanon examines colonialism’s impact on black as well as white people in both colonized (or formerly colonized) regions such as the Caribbean, and in the countries of the colonizers, such as France. While the 20th century saw the official end of most of the Western empires that controlled vast stretches of the world, Fanon shows that the legacy of colonialism continues to determine the way that people experience reality in the present. 

He admits: “The truth is that the black race is dispersed and is no longer unified.” For this reason, black people outside of Africa are alienated from one another and from a sense of their own history, ancestry, and identity.

       

Black as Biological :

A theme throughout cultural representations of Black people, according to Fanon, is that they are a symbol for the biological. This means that they are not thought of as thinking or feeling people, but primarily as physical bodies like animals and beasts. One consequence of this is the over-sexualization of Black people. Reduced to their bodies, they are also reduced to the purely physical and sexual side of human life. In turn, Fanon argues, this is why Black people are feared in European society. They are seen as overly sexual and therefore dangerous.

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon’s, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon’s masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements internationally, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

The black man possesses two dimensions: 

one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking. Nobody dreams of challenging the fact that its principal inspiration is nurtured by the core of theories which represent the black man as the missing link in the slow evolution from ape to man. These are objective facts that state reality.

Conclusion: 

 

Black Skin, White Masks applies a historical critique on the complex ways in which identity, particularly Blackness, is constructed and produced. Fanon confronts complex formations of colonized psychic constructions of Blackness in the book. Fanon perceived colonialism as a form of domination whose necessary goal for success was the reordering of the world of indigenous (“native”) peoples. He saw violence as the defining characteristic of colonialism

 Work citation:

Fanon, Frantz, and Charles L. Markmann. Black Skin, White Masks. , 1967. Print.